“The Best of World SF, Volume 1” edited by Lavie Tidhar

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Rating: 4/5 Stars

A good anthology of stories from around the world that is not from North America or Britain. Stories are selected based on the editor’s taste, so it would not be possible for a reader to like all the stories. But the anthology still shows the wide breath of writing that is World SF. Of the stories here, the ones I liked are by Aliette de Bodard, Vina Jie-Min Prasad, Vandana Singh, Han Song, Yi-Sheng Ng, R.S.A. Garcia, Hannu Rajaniemi, Emil H. Petersen, Ekaterina Sedia, Kofi Nyameye, Lauren Beukes, Karin Tidbeck and Zen Cho.

• “Immersion” by Aliette de Bodard: in a future where immersive devices can be worn to hide who you are and ‘guide’ you on how to behave, a woman who has hidden herself behind one for ages now struggles to emerge, with the help of others who are not keen on the immersive devices.
• “Debtless” by Chen Qiufan (trans. from Chinese by Blake Stone-Banks): a space miner suffers from strange dreams about paying off of ‘debts’ and seeing people he should be familiar with. But it is only after a series of accidents that kill fellow space miners that he begins to suspect something is not right with his memory, leading to a crisis where his dreams are shown to be a reality hidden from him.
• “Fandom for Robots” by Vina Jie-Min Prasad: the world’s only self-aware robot is an exhibit in a robot museum. One day, it is asked about watching a Japanese anime because one of the characters in it resembles the robot. This sets of series of events leading to it writing and collaborating on fan fiction.
• “Virtual Snapshots” by Tlotlo Tsamaase: a strange tale of a person born ‘unnaturally’ in Africa, bring asked to return to the family that cast him out, in a future between the digital haves and the digital have-nots.
• “What The Dead Man Said” by Chinelo Onwualu: a person returns to his homeland after his father’s death in Africa in a future where climate change has ravaged the world and people are sought to repopulate countries. But the pain he feels that caused him to leave Africa cannot be removed by taking to his dead father.
• “Delhi” by Vandana Singh: in the city of Delhi, a man catches glimpses of the past and future. After his suicide attempt, because of the visions, is stopped, he finds himself travelling around Delhi, stopping others with similar visions from ending their lives, while searching for a vision given to him on a computer printout that may be his purpose in life.
• “The Wheel of Samsara” by Han Song (trans. from Chinese by the author): a daughter visits a lamasery only to discover a strange prayer wheel that emits strange noises. Her father and research student investigates it, and they dispute over a hypothesis that the sounds are from our own universe contained within the wheel. Only an unexpected revelation would show if it is right or wrong.
• “Xingzhou” by Yi-Sheng Ng: a fantastical tale about various humans and alien creatures who travel to Xingzhou (a glowing city or country in space) to live their own lives through an era containing hard work, invasions, insurrections, peace and nation building.
• “Prayer” by Taiyo Fujii (trans. from Japanese by Kamil Spychalski): a team attempts to infiltrate a ship at sea, only to fall victim to prayer rituals.
• “The Green Ship” by Francesco Verso (trans. from Italian by Michael Colbert): refugees in a ship from Africa heading through the Mediterranean are intercepted by an unusual ship that would bring them to an unusual promised land.
• “Eyes of the Crocodile” by Malena Salazar Maciá (trans. from Spanish by Toshiya Kamei): on a world where nanobots have gone wild and is killing life, a woman infected with them makes a desperate journey to save her own life by reprogramming the nanobots to save lives instead of destroying it.
• “Bootblack” by Tade Thompson: an eyewitness account of a boy who shines shoes meeting with a stranger who wears strange clothes. His account of the meetings would reveal the stranger’s purpose on visiting the town at that time.
• “The Emptiness in the Heart of all Things” by Fabio Fernandes: a series of murders leads an investigator to interview a reclusive writer that may be at the centre of it. But what she finds instead is an urban legend come to life and a desire to be near another.
• “The Sun From Both Sides” by R.S.A. Garcia: a fascinating story about the love between a wife and a husband that is tested when the husband is kidnapped and then rescued, followed by a demand for the husband to return home. It starts off like a light fantasy story, but quickly turns into a science fiction tale that spans worlds and involves advanced technology and strange planetary ecosystems.
• “Dump” by Cristina Jurado (trans. from Spanish by Steve Redwood): the story of a girl who lived by searching for items in a huge pile of plastic rubbish. But one day, she finds a rare item, and it may lead her to a better existence.
• “Rue Chair” by Gerardo Horacio Porcayo (trans. from Spanish by the author): a search within a fabled pleasure palace filled with exotic and illegal pleasures leads one man to accept a simple pleasure. But he never asks what pleasures his partner is interested in.
• “His Master’s Voice” by Hannu Rajaniemi: a fantastical tale of a dog and cat who miss their master and wants him back, in a future where uploads are possible but only one embodied person is allowed to exist at a time. But not if the dog and cat get their way.
• “Benjamin Schneider’s Little Greys” by Nir Yaniv (trans. from Hebrew by Lavie Tidhar): a doctor is visited every week for years by a boy with various ailments. But one day, he visits with an unusual disease that the doctor doesn’t understand, yet he feels an attraction towards it.
• “The Cryptid” by Emil H. Petersen (trans. from Icelandic by the author): an explorer and her assistant prepare to seek a serpent (a cryptid) in a lake to prove its existence. What they give may be more than they bargain for.
• “The Bank of Burkina Faso” by Ekaterina Sedia: a story that starts off sounding like the standard scan email to withdraw money from a foreign bank turns into something else altogether when the bank might exist in dreams, like the dream of dogs.
• “An Incomplete Guide to Understanding the Rose Infestation Associated With EverTyphoid Patients in the Tropical IcyLand Urban Indian Slum” by Kuzhali Manickavel: a story that describes the strange symptoms and manifestations of an unusual disease.
• “The Old Man with The Third Hand” by Kofi Nyameye: a child meets an unusual old man on a beach and become friends. But things suddenly changed when the parents confront the child about the friendship, leading the reader to wonder if the friendship was imaginary or not.
• “The Green” by Lauren Beukes: on an alien world, grunt workers are tasked with gathering dangerous samples is alien fauna. But after one collection job goes badly wrong, one worker wants out but is ‘offered’ another chance on the job, but with changes that might be considered disagreeable.
• “The Last Voyage of Skidbladnir” by Karin Tidbeck: a person good at fixing things joins a ship travelling between the worlds. But things are not right as ‘living’ parts is the ship begin to intrude into other parts. The engineer says it is time the ship gets a new shell, but the captain disagrees. Thus starts a new journey by the person with a ship on the run, a new body.
• “Prime Meridian” by Silvia Moreno-Garcia: set in a near future in Mexico, it tells the story of a girl barely making a living by taking on gig work involving socializing with people. But she still dreams of going to Mars one day. And after meeting her former boyfriend again and after other events, she may make it come true.
• “If At First You Don’t Succeed” by Zen Cho: a fun and emotional story about an imugi, a water being who strives to become a celestial dragon. But it’s attempts to do so are thwarted by humans who insist it is an imugi. But one day, it meets an academic who changes its life by accepting it for what it is, and what it can become.

Book read from 2021/06/16 to 2021/06/29